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| Sauropods relax and get cleaned up a bit, too. |
Meaning: [owner of the land where it was found, Ricardo] Farais's Patagonian reptile
Time: Middle Jurassic, c 165 million years ago
Place: Patagonia
Size: 15-16.5 metres (49-54 feet) long, 7.8-9.4 tonnes (8.6-10.4 tons)
Type of Dinosaur: cetiosaurid sauropod [primitive giant long-necked dinosaur]
Here, an adult and juvenile of the long-necked sauropod dinosaur Patagosaurus do something you don't see sauropods do often in palaeoart: sit down and relax. While resting by a tree on a hill, the giants are visited by little heterodontosaurs called Manidens - small, fuzzy omnivorous dinosaurs with beaks and procumbent tusks. I've imagined a scenario here that this is a sort of cleaning station where the large dinosaurs can come and rest while the small heterodontosaurs pick away parasites, flakes of sloughing skin and scales, and such.
Heck, let's give the little guys a profile too:
Name: Manidens condorensis
Meaning: hand-tooth from Cerro Cóndor [in reference to the shape of its back teeth and the village near its discovery site]
Time: Middle Jurassic, c 165 million years ago
Place: Patagonia
Size: 60-70 centimetres (23.6-27.6 inches) long
Type of Dinosaur: heterodontosaurid [tusked beaked dinosaur]
Technically, I may have fudged this one a bit. Manidens and Patagosaurus are from the same geologic formation but Manidens might be from a layer a couple of million years older than Patagosaurus. As far as I know, the dates for their formation are a bit uncertain so I'm not too concerned with drawing them as contemporaries. Certainly they would have had related animals coexisting if nothing else.
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